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Top Web Tech Skills: 10 Years ago

This is an article I'm posting just for fun. We'll get back to bootstrap startup advice next time.

I ran across a spreadsheet I made in 2000, when I was just figuring out what skills I would need to become a professional web programmer and get paid the big bucks. I had pored over numerous job postings on Dice.com, and from that I created this data:

Here's the raw data (bold items are graphed):

Skill

Job Postings

Perl

134

Unix

74

SQL

65

Java

58

Oracle

45

JavaScript

39

Apache

26

mod Perl

18

XML

13

NT

11

DBI

9

Solaris

9

SyBase

8

PHP

7

ASP

7

Photoshop

5

ColdFusion

4

Python

3

IIS

2

Flash

1

DreamWeaver

1

Visual Basic

1

C++ at the time had 35, and is not included because it wasn't necessarily web-focused. And HTML is not included because I already knew it.

Glad I ended up on the West Coast, which at the time was the money spot.

For those curious, my first professional gig (after a good year and a half of studying web programming) was for a company just south of Seattle, and the pay was $50,000 per year. Not bad for entry-level, 9 years ago.